564 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



[By means of lantern slides representing Dr. Scharff's comdncing 

 elucidation of the modifications of the land connections during 

 Tertiary times, a demonstration was given of the wanderings of the 

 primates, which the facts of paleontology and comparative anatomy 

 demand; the object being to direct attention to the fact that at each 

 stage in the migrations of man's ancestors, menotyphlous, prosimian, 

 platyrrhine, catarrhine, and anthropoid, the improgressive members 

 remained somewhere in the neighborhood of the home of their imme- 

 diate ancestors, and that those which wandered into new surroundings 

 had to struggle for their footing, and as the result of this striving 

 attained a higher rank. 



Other slides were shown to demonstrate the fact that in this series 

 of primates there was a steady development of the brain — expansion 

 and differentiation of the \dsual, tactile, and auditory centers, and 

 development of the meeting territory between them; a marked 

 growth and specialization of the motor centers, and the power of 

 skilled movements, especially of the hands and fingers; and a regular 

 expansion of the prefrontal area — along the lines marked out once 

 for all when the first primate was formed from some menotyphlous 

 progenitor.] 



Thus the outstanding feature in the gradual evolution of the pri- 

 mate brain is a steady growth and differentiation of precisely those 

 cortical areas which took on an enhanced importance in the earliest 

 primates. 



So far in this address I have been delving into the extremely re- 

 mote, rather than the nearer, ancestry of man, because I believe the 

 germs of his intellectual preeminence were sown at the very dawn of 

 the Tertiary period, when the first anaptomorphid began to rely upon 

 vision rather than smell as its guiding sense. In all the succeeding 

 ages since that remote time the fuller cultivation of the means of 

 profiting by experience, which the tarsioid had adopted, led to the 

 steady upward progression of the primates. From time to time 

 many indi\'iduals, finding themselves amidst surroundings which 

 were thoroughly congenial and called for no effort, lagged behind; 

 and in Tarsius and the lemurs, the New World monkeys, the Old 

 World monkeys, and the anthropoids, not to mention the extinct 

 forms, we find preserved a series of these laggards which have turned 

 aside from the highway which led to man's estate. 



The primates at first were a small and humble folk, who led a quiet, 

 unobtrusive, and safe life in the branches of trees, taking small part 

 in the fierce competition for size and supremacy that was being waged 

 upon the earth beneath them by their carnivorous, ungulate, and 

 other brethren. But all the time they were cultivating that equable 

 development of all their senses and limbs, and that special develop- 

 ment of the more intellectually useful faculties of the mind which, in 



